Monthly Archives: September 2014

Can you imagine how different America would be if Marcy Kaptur had been the Attorney General the last three Presidential Administrations?

She would have demanded “Nip it in the Bud!” like Barney Fife always urged Sheriff Andy to do in Mayberry.

I remember working on these things in 1999 & 2000. Due to homelessness (that I chose to work on the bank fraud), I often used a Swiss friends computer. One day he demanded I sit down and show him what was going on.

At the end of his presention I gave to him, he slapped his head, hung his head, and growled ferociously “Ahhhh! No Judge in All of Europe would let them get away with this!!!”

Maybe not. But Europe, as did a lot of the rest of the world had to pay a price.

Hank Paulson in the videos “The Men Who Crashed the World” continued to tell world leaders we had no idea a bank failure in New York would set the earth on a collision course with economic pain and suffering.

Really? Because I remember a Swiss National with tears in his eyes, praying we could stop the bad guys back one dreadful summer afternoon in 1999.

For sure McColl, The Man With Americas Money (the book is available on Amazon) knew. He spelled out every little detail in his 1999 book of his grand experiment. McColl, Ken Lewis, Alex Sink, these three did everything possible to ambush Florida, D.C. and Wall Street. He said if the experiment failed they would be long gone by the time the world found out.

Too bad, because they did slink off Scott free. Too bad the 4 part series “The Men Who Crashed the World” didn’t expose what a Swiss man knew in 1999. Too bad God did not see fit to make Marcy Kaptur Attorney General of the United States instead of an Ohio Congresswoman. Too bad the Swiss man had to leave town for surgery.

Too bad Attorney General Eric Holder passed out “get out of jail free cards” to the crooks. Too bad *Nobody* saw 9 million American senior citizens going hungry, and 1 million American homeless school children crying they wanted to go home at night.

Yep. It is all too bad. But onetime, I slept in a tiny cold bathtub listening to the song “Imagine” in my mind. I used it as a lullaby. The nightmare I was living, and later Hank Paulson and the world, could not be happening.

Martin Luther King had a dream. So did billions of people across the world. And too bad, this type of exchange, was not it.

May God Bless the U.S.A., and peoples of the world in fear, pain, and suffering. May He judge the liars that have fed this meltdown, with all the wrath of an outraged Marcy Kaptur and more.

As do I so the topic is appropriate. For many years, former friends and acquaintances would cross the street rather than chance an encounter with me. Hiding behind fake smiles, and nervous body language it was often downright comical.

Even by telephone, by the fifth call that “Oh, someone’s at the door!” and “I was just getting to walk out the door when you called!” it becomes rather obvious you are being shown to the door. How sad people are unable to be candid and must resort to such artifices.

On occasion, I asked point blank why an adult felt compelled to run and hide as though they would be murdered in cold blood.

“Well, you can’t deny you have issues now.”

Yes, I do. I had just finished a three year forensic accounting project, that had dovetailed into a seven year rodeo with the BIG Wall Street Firm, when I ran smack dab into the National Bank Fraud epidemic.

Fear and intimidation tactics are illegal under both State and Federal laws. Yet be assured when Gangster Bankers arrive en masse, they make no bones about it. “Shut Up and Fish” or people will die. So yes, I had a lot of issues with that. I also had a lot of issues with a Government that not only encouraged such behaviour, but helped financially reward and make extremely profitable such antics.

Business isn’t always pretty. Business isn’t always nice. But to support flawed business models (and yes stealing, lying, cheating is flawed and it’s a dang shame that has to even be pointed out to some people), at the risk of dinging Americans 40% of their wealth in a 3 year period is grotesque.

There have been times that my “issues” have been settled informally via the most “ungentlemanly” types of agreements. Yet eventually as they were never written I forget, and the fight breaks out again.

Interesting when certain rednecks would talk about muslim religous hate back in 2000. I told them the only pissed off muslim I had ever met had told me point blank it had nothing to do with religion. “They name this town Gainesville! I call it Looserville!! You let these people get away with stealing everything? My hate is nothing to do with what god you worship, my hate is you lie and steal.” And despite my protests that we were actually fighting the same bums, he had no trust in American rule of law. According to him, we had two sets of laws. One for rich, and one for poor.

I disagreed with that man fervently. But of course I was only three years into the underbelly of the beast, and did not purchase McColl’s confessional book until March 2002.

Now the #justicegap and #incomeinequality are popular parlor and basement topics. My advocacy for a strong baby boomers middle class (to help elderly parents and millennial children), never was intended to be a seventeen year rant against the “machine”. Heck I thought I was part of the machine that worked pretty darn good. Not a dog to cower beneath a whip. This whole class warfare has been fueled and stoked by the Newly Minted Aristocracy so much, I thought of this book and guess who I thought of when I read this?

“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend,” observed the Marquis, “will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof,” looking up to it, “shuts out the sky.“

In fact I actually feel sorry for our President. He is not the first one, but rather the third one to be set-up by “The Man” I know has more “issues” than Carter has liver pills. Que Sera, Sera !

This article seems to have set off a wave of criticism against regulators. I think people missed the point.

The primary bank regulator is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The OCC as this agency is known, was charged with the duty of oversight to assure both the “safety and soundness” of the U.S. banking system. Not only did they catastrophically fail in that duty, but in a way that Ben Bernanke said was worse than the state of banks in the Great Depression.

First of all the U.S. government never told banks to write toxic loans. In fact, 47 state Attorney Generals, plus the Attorney Generals of D.C. and Puerto Rico, sent a blistering letter to the head of the OCC, John Dugan complaining in 2005 that the banks were out of control making bad loans and hurting consumers (to push share growth and dividends by preying on the poor and middle class).

Moreover in a letter to that same John Dugan, the Congressional House Financial Committee sent a letter that opened in alarm that banks were “operating without any meaningful law or enforcement”.

Still, they were allowed to operate with impunity. I have stated that one reason may have been the active role the U.S. Chamber took in intervening on the banks behalf in litigation trying to control the reckless lending. Another, and by far most critical, is the influence the bankers were using to strong arm the credit rating agencies into labeling purely rotten loans as quality, thereby defrauding Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the other investors.

By the time all this illegality began coming to light, the Government and the markets primary hysteria was trying to find out where had all the mess landed so they could determine who the bagholders were that had been stiffed, and secondly, exactly how much c.r.a.p. had they produced?

Meanwhile the C.E.O.’s that became thoroughly stinking rich from the esoteric scams, smirked as they held a nation economic hostage. That if they went to jail, they would only go after bankrupting the nation and taking the entire economy down with them.

I believe the point of Mr. Doorn’s article is that America’s middle class lost not only their credit ratings in the banker induced economic crisis, and 40% of their wealth as reported*, but again we are being told they could serve that market and keep housing from going bust but only if regulators back off and let them off the hook for the sins they committed before by selling c.r.a.p. as quality.

It is a threat. Again, and it seems to be none too veiled. America fell once, almost to our knees before kow towing to their threats. To do so again, so soon, when not even a century has passed since they last got us, would be the height of stupidity. But then again, maybe you really “can’t fix stupid” as they say. Let’s hope they are merely extremely sly crooks, and we are not as cognitively impaired as they hope.

– Barbara Cochlin

*Read how Inequality is hurting our economy, and Americans lost 40% of wealth in a 3 yr period. A link to the Wall Street Journal article was posted on this blog August 7th, 2014.